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Developer Information
`````````````````````
Learn how to build modules of your own in any language, and also how to extend Ansible through several kinds of plugins. Explore Ansible's Python API and write Python plugins to integrate with other solutions in your environment.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
developing_api
developing_inventory
developing_modules
developing_plugins
Developers will also likely be interested in the fully-discoverable `REST API <http://ansibleworks.com/ansibleworks-awx>`_ that is part of AnsibleWorks AWX. It's great for embedding Ansible in all manner of applications.

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Detailed Guides
```````````````
This section is new and evolving. The idea here is explore particular use cases in greater depth and provide a more "top down" explanation of some basic features.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
guide_aws
guide_rax
guide_vagrant
guide_rolling_upgrade
Pending topics may include: Docker, Jenkins, Google Compute Engine, Linode/Digital Ocean, Continous Deployment, and more.

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.. _an_introduction:
The Basics
``````````
Before we dive into the really fun parts -- playbooks, configuration management, deployment, and orchestration, we'll learn how to get Ansible installed and some basic concepts. We'll go over how to execute ad-hoc commands in parallel across your nodes using /usr/bin/ansible. We'll also see what sort of modules are available in Ansible's core (though you can also write your own, which we'll also show later).
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
intro_installation
intro_getting_started
intro_inventory
intro_dynamic_inventory
intro_patterns
intro_adhoc
intro_configuration
Modules
```````
Ansible modules are resources that are distributed to remote nodes to make them perform particular tasks or match a particular
state. Ansible follows a "batteries included" philosophy, so you have a lot of great modules for all manner of
IT tasks in the core distribution. This means modules are well up-to-date and you don't have to hunt for an implementation
that will work on your platform. You may think of the module library as a toolbox full of useful system management tools,
and playbooks as the instructions for building something using those tools.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
modules
.. _overview:
Architecture Diagram
````````````````````
.. image:: http://www.ansibleworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ANSIBLE_DIAGRAM.jpg
:alt: ansible architecture diagram
:width: 788px
:height: 436px
.. _introduction_to_playbooks:
Playbooks
`````````
Playbooks are Ansible's configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.
If Ansible modules are the tools in your workshop, playbooks are your design plans.
At a basic level, playbooks can be used to manage configurations of and deployments to remote machines. At a more advanced level, they can sequence multi-tier rollouts involving rolling updates, and can delegate actions to other hosts, interacting with monitoring servers and load balancers along the way.
While there's a lot of information here, there's no need to learn everything at once. You can start small and pick up more features
over time as you need them.
Playbooks are designed to be human-readable and are developed in a basic text language. There are multiple
ways to organize playbooks and the files they include, and we'll offer up some suggestions on that and making the most out of Ansible.
It is recommended to look at `Example Playbooks <https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples>`_ while reading along with the playbook documentation. These illustrate best practices as well as how to put many of the various concepts together.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
:maxdepth: 2
intro
playbooks
playbooks_roles
playbooks_variables
playbooks_conditionals
playbooks_loops
playbooks_best_practices
.. _advanced_topics_in_playbooks:
Special Topics In Playbooks
```````````````````````````
Here are some playbook features that not everyone may need to learn, but can be quite useful for particular applications.
Browsing these topics is recommended as you may find some useful tips here, but feel free to learn the basics of Ansible first
and adopt these only if they seem relevant or useful to your environment.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
playbooks_acceleration
playbooks_async
playbooks_checkmode
playbooks_delegation
playbooks_environment
playbooks_error_handling
playbooks_lookups
playbooks_prompts
playbooks_tags
.. _ansibleworks_awx:
playbooks_special_topics
modules
guides
developing
faq
glossary
YAMLSyntax
AnsibleWorks AWX
````````````````
@ -145,23 +65,6 @@ Read the "About" page on the Galaxy site for more information.
.. _detailed_guides:
Detailed Guides
```````````````
This section is new and evolving. The idea here is explore particular use cases in greater depth and provide a more "top down" explanation of some basic features.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
guide_aws
guide_rax
guide_vagrant
guide_rolling_upgrade
Pending topics may include: Docker, Jenkins, Google Compute Engine, Linode/Digital Ocean, Continous Deployment, and more.
.. _community_information:
Community Information
`````````````````````
@ -170,35 +73,4 @@ IT automation solutions that work well for them. Should you wish to get more i
`Ways to interact <https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/CONTRIBUTING.md>`_
.. _developer_information:
Developer Information
`````````````````````
Learn how to build modules of your own in any language, and also how to extend Ansible through several kinds of plugins. Explore Ansible's Python API and write Python plugins to integrate with other solutions in your environment.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
developing_api
developing_inventory
developing_modules
developing_plugins
Developers will also likely be interested in the fully-discoverable `REST API <http://ansibleworks.com/ansibleworks-awx>`_ that is part of AnsibleWorks AWX. It's great for embedding Ansible in all manner of applications.
.. _misc:
Miscellaneous
`````````````
Some additional topics you may be interested in:
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
faq
glossary
YAMLSyntax

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Introduction
============
Before we dive into the really fun parts -- playbooks, configuration management, deployment, and orchestration, we'll learn how to get Ansible installed and some basic concepts. We'll go over how to execute ad-hoc commands in parallel across your nodes using /usr/bin/ansible. We'll also see what sort of modules are available in Ansible's core (though you can also write your own, which we'll also show later).
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
intro_installation
intro_getting_started
intro_inventory
intro_dynamic_inventory
intro_patterns
intro_adhoc
intro_configuration

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Intro to Playbooks
==================
Playbooks
`````````
.. _about_playbooks:
Playbooks are Ansible's configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process.
About Playbooks
```````````````
If Ansible modules are the tools in your workshop, playbooks are your design plans.
Playbooks are a completely different way to use ansible than in adhoc task execution mode, and are
particularly powerful.
At a basic level, playbooks can be used to manage configurations of and deployments to remote machines. At a more advanced level, they can sequence multi-tier rollouts involving rolling updates, and can delegate actions to other hosts, interacting with monitoring servers and load balancers along the way.
Simply put, playbooks are the basis for a really simple configuration management and multi-machine deployment system,
unlike any that already exist, and one that is very well suited to deploying complex applications.
While there's a lot of information here, there's no need to learn everything at once. You can start small and pick up more features
over time as you need them.
Playbooks can declare configurations, but they can also orchestrate steps of
any manual ordered process, even as different steps must bounce back and forth
between sets of machines in particular orders. They can launch tasks
synchronously or asynchronously.
Playbooks are designed to be human-readable and are developed in a basic text language. There are multiple
ways to organize playbooks and the files they include, and we'll offer up some suggestions on that and making the most out of Ansible.
While you might run the main /usr/bin/ansible program for ad-hoc
tasks, playbooks are more likely to be kept in source control and used
to push out your configuration or assure the configurations of your
remote systems are in spec.
It is recommended to look at `Example Playbooks <https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples>`_ while reading along with the playbook documentation. These illustrate best practices as well as how to put many of the various concepts together.
There are also some full sets of playbooks illustrating a lot of these techniques in the
`ansible-examples repository <https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples>`_. We'd recommend
looking at these in another tab as you go along.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
There are also many jumping off points after you learn playbooks, so hop back to the documentation
index after you're done with this section.
.. _playbook_language_example:
Playbook Language Example
`````````````````````````
Playbooks are expressed in YAML format (see :doc:`YAMLSyntax`) and have a minimum of syntax, which intentionally
tries to not be a programming language or script, but rather a model of a configuration or a process.
Each playbook is composed of one or more 'plays' in a list.
The goal of a play is to map a group of hosts to some well defined roles, represented by
things ansible calls tasks. At a basic level, a task is nothing more than a call
to an ansible module, which you should have learned about in earlier chapters.
By composing a playbook of multiple 'plays', it is possible to
orchestrate multi-machine deployments, running certain steps on all
machines in the webservers group, then certain steps on the database
server group, then more commands back on the webservers group, etc.
"plays" are more or less a sports analogy. You can have quite a lot of plays that affect your systems
to do different things. It's not as if you were just defining one particular state or model, and you
can run different plays at different times.
For starters, here's a playbook that contains just one play::
---
- hosts: webservers
vars:
http_port: 80
max_clients: 200
remote_user: root
tasks:
- name: ensure apache is at the latest version
yum: pkg=httpd state=latest
- name: write the apache config file
template: src=/srv/httpd.j2 dest=/etc/httpd.conf
notify:
- restart apache
- name: ensure apache is running
service: name=httpd state=started
handlers:
- name: restart apache
service: name=httpd state=restarted
Below, we'll break down what the various features of the playbook language are.
.. _playbook_basics:
Basics
``````
.. _playbook_hosts_and_users:
Hosts and Users
+++++++++++++++
For each play in a playbook, you get to choose which machines in your infrastructure
to target and what remote user to complete the steps (called tasks) as.
The `hosts` line is a list of one or more groups or host patterns,
separated by colons, as described in the :doc:`intro_patterns`
documentation. The `remote_user` is just the name of the user account::
---
- hosts: webservers
remote_user: root
.. Note::
The `remote_user` parameter was formerly called just `user`. It was renamed in Ansible 1.4 to make it more distinguishable from the `user` module (used to create users on remote systems).
Remote users can also be defined per task::
---
- hosts: webservers
remote_user: root
tasks:
- name: test connection
ping:
remote_user: yourname
.. Note::
The `remote_user` parameter for tasks was added in 1.4.
Support for running things from sudo is also available::
---
- hosts: webservers
remote_user: yourname
sudo: yes
You can also use sudo on a particular task instead of the whole play::
---
- hosts: webservers
remote_user: yourname
tasks:
- service: name=nginx state=started
sudo: yes
You can also login as you, and then sudo to different users than root::
---
- hosts: webservers
remote_user: yourname
sudo: yes
sudo_user: postgres
If you need to specify a password to sudo, run `ansible-playbook` with ``--ask-sudo-pass`` (`-K`).
If you run a sudo playbook and the playbook seems to hang, it's probably stuck at the sudo prompt.
Just `Control-C` to kill it and run it again with `-K`.
.. important::
When using `sudo_user` to a user other than root, the module
arguments are briefly written into a random tempfile in /tmp.
These are deleted immediately after the command is executed. This
only occurs when sudoing from a user like 'bob' to 'timmy', not
when going from 'bob' to 'root', or logging in directly as 'bob' or
'root'. If this concerns you that this data is briefly readable
(not writable), avoid transferring uncrypted passwords with
`sudo_user` set. In other cases, '/tmp' is not used and this does
not come into play. Ansible also takes care to not log password
parameters.
.. _tasks_list:
Tasks list
++++++++++
Each play contains a list of tasks. Tasks are executed in order, one
at a time, against all machines matched by the host pattern,
before moving on to the next task. It is important to understand that, within a play,
all hosts are going to get the same task directives. It is the purpose of a play to map
a selection of hosts to tasks.
When running the playbook, which runs top to bottom, hosts with failed tasks are
taken out of the rotation for the entire playbook. If things fail, simply correct the playbook file and rerun.
The goal of each task is to execute a module, with very specific arguments.
Variables, as mentioned above, can be used in arguments to modules.
Modules are 'idempotent', meaning if you run them
again, they will make only the changes they must in order to bring the
system to the desired state. This makes it very safe to rerun
the same playbook multiple times. They won't change things
unless they have to change things.
The `command` and `shell` modules will typically rerun the same command again,
which is totally ok if the command is something like
'chmod' or 'setsebool', etc. Though there is a 'creates' flag available which can
be used to make these modules also idempotent.
Every task should have a `name`, which is included in the output from
running the playbook. This is output for humans, so it is
nice to have reasonably good descriptions of each task step. If the name
is not provided though, the string fed to 'action' will be used for
output.
Tasks can be declared using the legacy "action: module options" format, but
it is recommended that you use the more conventional "module: options" format.
This recommended format is used throughout the documentation, but you may
encounter the older format in some playbooks.
Here is what a basic task looks like, as with most modules,
the service module takes key=value arguments::
tasks:
- name: make sure apache is running
service: name=httpd state=running
The `command` and `shell` modules are the one modules that just takes a list
of arguments, and don't use the key=value form. This makes
them work just like you would expect. Simple::
tasks:
- name: disable selinux
command: /sbin/setenforce 0
The command and shell module care about return codes, so if you have a command
whose successful exit code is not zero, you may wish to do this::
tasks:
- name: run this command and ignore the result
shell: /usr/bin/somecommand || /bin/true
Or this::
tasks:
- name: run this command and ignore the result
shell: /usr/bin/somecommand
ignore_errors: True
If the action line is getting too long for comfort you can break it on
a space and indent any continuation lines::
tasks:
- name: Copy ansible inventory file to client
copy: src=/etc/ansible/hosts dest=/etc/ansible/hosts
owner=root group=root mode=0644
Variables can be used in action lines. Suppose you defined
a variable called 'vhost' in the 'vars' section, you could do this::
tasks:
- name: create a virtual host file for {{ vhost }}
template: src=somefile.j2 dest=/etc/httpd/conf.d/{{ vhost }}
Those same variables are usable in templates, which we'll get to later.
Now in a very basic playbook all the tasks will be listed directly in that play, though it will usually
make more sense to break up tasks using the 'include:' directive. We'll show that a bit later.
.. _action_shorthand:
Action Shorthand
````````````````
.. versionadded:: 0.8
Ansible prefers listing modules like this in 0.8 and later::
template: src=templates/foo.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf
You will notice in earlier versions, this was only available as::
action: template src=templates/foo.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf
The old form continues to work in newer versions without any plan of deprecation.
.. _handlers:
Handlers: Running Operations On Change
``````````````````````````````````````
As we've mentioned, modules are written to be 'idempotent' and can relay when
they have made a change on the remote system. Playbooks recognize this and
have a basic event system that can be used to respond to change.
These 'notify' actions are triggered at the end of each block of tasks in a playbook, and will only be
triggered once even if notified by multiple different tasks.
For instance, multiple resources may indicate
that apache needs to be restarted because they have changed a config file,
but apache will only be bounced once to avoid unnecessary restarts.
Here's an example of restarting two services when the contents of a file
change, but only if the file changes::
- name: template configuration file
template: src=template.j2 dest=/etc/foo.conf
notify:
- restart memcached
- restart apache
The things listed in the 'notify' section of a task are called
handlers.
Handlers are lists of tasks, not really any different from regular
tasks, that are referenced by name. Handlers are what notifiers
notify. If nothing notifies a handler, it will not run. Regardless
of how many things notify a handler, it will run only once, after all
of the tasks complete in a particular play.
Here's an example handlers section::
handlers:
- name: restart memcached
service: name=memcached state=restarted
- name: restart apache
service: name=apache state=restarted
Handlers are best used to restart services and trigger reboots. You probably
won't need them for much else.
.. note::
Notify handlers are always run in the order written.
Roles are described later on. It's worthwhile to point out that handlers are
automatically processed between 'pre_tasks', 'roles', 'tasks', and 'post_tasks'
sections. If you ever want to flush all the handler commands immediately though,
in 1.2 and later, you can::
tasks:
- shell: some tasks go here
- meta: flush_handlers
- shell: some other tasks
In the above example any queued up handlers would be processed early when the 'meta'
statement was reached. This is a bit of a niche case but can come in handy from
time to time.
.. _executing_a_playbook:
Executing A Playbook
````````````````````
Now that you've learned playbook syntax, how do you run a playbook? It's simple.
Let's run a playbook using a parallelism level of 10::
ansible-playbook playbook.yml -f 10
.. _tips_and_tricks:
Ansible-Pull
````````````
Should you want to invert the architecture of Ansible, so that nodes check in to a central location, instead
of pushing configuration out to them, you can.
Ansible-pull is a small script that will checkout a repo of configuration instructions from git, and then
run ansible-playbook against that content.
Assuming you load balance your checkout location, ansible-pull scales essentially infinitely.
Run 'ansible-pull --help' for details.
There's also a `clever playbook <https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples/blob/master/language_features/ansible_pull.yml>`_ available to using ansible in push mode to configure ansible-pull via a crontab!
Tips and Tricks
```````````````
Look at the bottom of the playbook execution for a summary of the nodes that were targeted
and how they performed. General failures and fatal "unreachable" communication attempts are
kept separate in the counts.
If you ever want to see detailed output from successful modules as well as unsuccessful ones,
use the '--verbose' flag. This is available in Ansible 0.5 and later.
Ansible playbook output is vastly upgraded if the cowsay
package is installed. Try it!
To see what hosts would be affected by a playbook before you run it, you
can do this::
ansible-playbook playbook.yml --list-hosts.
.. seealso::
:doc:`YAMLSyntax`
Learn about YAML syntax
:doc:`playbooks_best_practices`
Various tips about managing playbooks in the real world
:doc:`index`
Hop back to the documentation index for a lot of special topics about playbooks
:doc:`modules`
Learn about available modules
:doc:`developing_modules`
Learn how to extend Ansible by writing your own modules
:doc:`intro_patterns`
Learn about how to select hosts
`Github examples directory <https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples>`_
Complete end-to-end playbook examples
`Mailing List <http://groups.google.com/group/ansible-project>`_
Questions? Help? Ideas? Stop by the list on Google Groups
playbooks_roles
playbooks_variables
playbooks_conditionals
playbooks_loops
playbooks_best_practices

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Playbooks: Special Topics
`````````````````````````
Here are some playbook features that not everyone may need to learn, but can be quite useful for particular applications.
Browsing these topics is recommended as you may find some useful tips here, but feel free to learn the basics of Ansible first
and adopt these only if they seem relevant or useful to your environment.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 1
playbooks_acceleration
playbooks_async
playbooks_checkmode
playbooks_delegation
playbooks_environment
playbooks_error_handling
playbooks_lookups
playbooks_prompts
playbooks_tags